My older siblings came of age in the glory days of the early and mid-90s. The last great moment for mainstream rock music. Things got a little better in the mid-2000s (2003-2007) during the heyday of the White Stripes and some of the better 'indie' bands. And there will always be some isolated bright spots. But on the whole the genre, as a force in mainstream music, has been dead since the Smashing Pumpkins and Oasis horrifically murdered it c. 1997.

Oh fuck it, just forget this thread. I'm not making any sense. Really I just wanted an excuse to post American Hi-Fi. Found it when I was down a Youtube rabbit hole the other day and was like jesus christ, I know all the words to this terrible song but I completely forgot it ever existed.

I just wish the popular and current bands when I was 15 had been Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, not blink 182, Staind, Kid Rock, 3 Doors Down, Limp Bizkit, and whatever other goadawful music I still know by heart.

Germz wrote:I just wish the popular and current bands when I was 15 had been Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, not blink 182, Staind, Kid Rock, 3 Doors Down, Limp Bizkit, and whatever other goadawful music I still know by heart.

There is something to being born later and romanticizing earlier periods, I will say that. How else can I excuse my borderline absurd belief that Tom Petty may have been the most gifted American pop songwriter since Dylan?

Germz wrote:There is something to being born later and romanticizing earlier periods, I will say that. How else can I excuse my borderline absurd belief that Tom Petty may have been the most gifted American pop songwriter since Dylan?

Yeah 80s mainstream rock got pretty bad. The early years were probably better than the later ones.

The Vines and The Strokes were pretty good bands but that era of rock 'saviours' began an endless cycle of derivative rehashing of early periods. The White Stripes were the best of that bunch obvs., but Elephant was their big mainstream moment, and it was the end of that period IMO, the beginning of a new one. Just like the release of American Idiot the following year signaled a big shift (and ultimately the death knell) for pop punk. Things really transitioned in 2003-03; there was a big changing of the guard as the darkness of the Iraq War years and the Bush re-election campaign set in on a broader cultural level.

Coldplay yielded one good hit per album; most of their singles were boring mediocrity imo.

As for JEW - yeah I'll grant that The Middle and Sweetness were probably the best pure pop-rock tunes of the period.

I stand by my belief that the years 1999-2003 represented a low point - if perhaps not the lowest, that can be debated - in the history of popular rock.

Germz wrote:There is something to being born later and romanticizing earlier periods, I will say that. How else can I excuse my borderline absurd belief that Tom Petty may have been the most gifted American pop songwriter since Dylan?

Late 90s/early 00s were terrible if you we're a lazy listener (which I very much was) and relied on what music reached you rather than digging around. Looking back, a lot of stuff I consider essential to me personally appeared around that time but I didn't listen to until much later. e.g. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was '02 but I probably didn't hear it til '07. Modest Mouse and Spoon arrived around then but I encountered them much more recently than that.

Jedrik wrote:Late 90s/early 00s were terrible if you we're a lazy listener (which I very much was) and relied on what music reached you rather than digging around. Looking back, a lot of stuff I consider essential to me personally appeared around that time but I didn't listen to until much later. e.g. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was '02 but I probably didn't hear it til '07. Modest Mouse and Spoon arrived around then but I encountered them much more recently than that.

Seems like the indie scene began flourishing around that time.

I've got about the same take on this. Most of the stuff worth listening to from that period definitely required some kind of digging.

This whole idea that we are even important is a fucking illusion. We’re just an accident left to our own devices.

Jedrik wrote:Late 90s/early 00s were terrible if you we're a lazy listener (which I very much was) and relied on what music reached you rather than digging around. Looking back, a lot of stuff I consider essential to me personally appeared around that time but I didn't listen to until much later. e.g. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was '02 but I probably didn't hear it til '07. Modest Mouse and Spoon arrived around then but I encountered them much more recently than that.

Seems like the indie scene began flourishing around that time.

I think we're pretty much saying the same thing. I just should have put the word 'mainstream' in my thread title.

Basically the same argument could be made for the alternative and underground punk scenes of the late 80s. They were the 'indie' of that era, and producing much better rock than the majority of mainstream rock at the time. R.E.M. is pretty much the textbook example. They had already released six albums by the time Losing my Religion broke in 1991, the same year as Nevermind and Ten. And any self-respecting R.E.M. fan will tell you that Out of Time, good as it was, was their worst album to date (with the possible exception of Green). Pretty much the same narrative you'll get about some of the indie bands that broke in 2003-04 and helped to give us the glory years of 2003-07. These were the best years in mainstream rock since 1991-94.

You also saw the same accusations of bandwagon-hopping leveled against perfectly decent bands like The Killers who hopped onto the trendy sound at the right time, but glossed it up with studio production and more importantly, hadn't put in the years in the trenches. Pearl Jam got some flak for this from some alternative snobs and scenesters, but the more egregrious example was STP's first record.